
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 19, 1993                   TAG: 9305190177
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

REPORT RAISES `FRIENDLY FIRE' DEATHS TO 15%

U.S. Army analysts have concluded that "friendly fire" caused about 15 percent of the casualties suffered in modern wars, and that many of the Americans who would fight in a future war likewise would be exposed to lethal fire from their own side.

Military leaders have put the average rate in past wars at about 2 percent, although such casualties in the Persian Gulf War were known to be about 17 percent.

But a newly disclosed analysis by the Army's Office of the Surgeon General has caused a sensation among Pentagon planners: It appears that the "normal" rate of fratricidal casualties in recent American wars has been closer to 15 percent than 2 percent.

The author of the study, Col. David M. Sa'adah, commented in the report he delivered at an Army Operations Research Symposium that the problem "has been ignored by our leaders."

Many veterans say Sa'adah's analysis confirms what they had suspected: that far more of the Americans who fell in wars during this century died from "friendly fire" than officials would admit.

The new Pentagon candor stems largely from Sa'adah's analysis of four American campaigns from which unusually comprehensive casualty records survive. The inference to be drawn from these records, he said in an interview, is that 15 percent of all American casualties in all wars were caused by American fire.

From an exhaustive survey of medical records (including autopsies), and by interviewing commanders and veterans, Sa'adah, a medical doctor, picked these battles for further analysis: the 1943 guerrilla campaign inside Japanese-occupied Burma by the unit dubbed "Merrill's Marauders"; the defense of the U.S. beachhead of Bougainville Island in the South Pacific in 1944; an exhaustive study of U.S. casualties in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969; and the Persian Gulf War.

Each of these studies included details of individual dead and wounded, and in many cases, positive identification of the weapons that caused the casualties.

Sa'adah's analysis suggests that fratricidal casualties in Burma were at least 14 percent, in Bougainville 24 percent, and in Vietnam 11 percent. The analysis confirmed earlier studies that showed fratricidal casualties in the Gulf War came to 17 percent.

It is no longer possible to wait "until you see the white of their eyes" before opening fire; tanks shoot at each other from beyond a mile and aircraft pilots may not see their targets at all, except on radar displays.

by CNB